“Punks”
Michael Nicoloff
TAXT Press, 2007
Alli Warren Interviews

Michael Nicoloff’s “Punks” was published in 2007 by TAXT Press. TAXT Press “makes visible the work of contemporary poets, writers, and artists previously under-represented in publication. TAXT chapbooks are always free.” “Punks” continues to make waves in the Bay Area and beyond. The work (which can be read in its entirety at Deep Oakland) playfully enacts cultural and emotional moments/epochs that feel at once familiar and eerie. In December of 2009, I “sat down” with Michael to ask him some questions about “Punks” — here’s what the man himself had to say…

Is it important to you that “Punks” was published by a small Bay Area chapbook press put out by one of your friends?

Hi Alli.  I can’t help but take this as a question about community, which tends to lead me to really frayed lines of thought. Community, friendship, locatedness (see, my answer is already fraying into your next question) are central preoccupations in my work and life, and I think recently I’ve been exploring those ideas in a more head-on way that seems poised to shift my writing practice. That’s a vague statement, I know, but I don’t care to be more specific than that right now, which isn’t an attempt to coyly generate intrigue for readers out there, but rather not to fuck myself up via early release of what’s presently less than formed (Jennifer Manzano says it’s like I’m swimming in a Chuck-E-Cheese ball pit of the mind).

What I am ready to say is that while my feelings towards the poetry community you and I share at this point vacillates between okayness and semi-alienation (and I’ll take responsibility for the parts of that that are my own doing), I’m always grateful for the moments when a collaborative impulse draws people together into making things like chapbooks. Writing “by yourself,” however theoretically debunked, is still more collaborative than it’s often perceived to be on a lived level, even in “innovative” writing — we own up to and/or laud ourselves for our acts of appropriation all the time, but the contributions of unpredictable flesh-and-blood humans tend to end up confined to the acknowledgment section in the front matter.

But regardless of the degree of acknowledgment it receives, when someone reaches out and says, hey, I want to publish your poems/for you to be part of this performance I’m doing/want to write an indecipherable novel with you — at its best it can strip away some of that difficulty and ambivalence one (I) might feel towards one’s poetic community and shifts one’s perspective back to one of the other centers of one’s writing life — namely, books, objects, things. The activity of my poetry community seems to center around the poles of going to readings and of the abstract idea of being amongst actively writing people (even if they’re not talking about it). But those poles, important as they are, can feel too cerebral, interior, and diffuse, like mental activity without concomitant object-making. It’s easy to lose track of what you’re doing. At its best, making a material object with other people serves to channel that diffuse energy into something more concrete.

And that’s what, I guess, I felt in my experience with “Punks,” which involved Suzanne Stein proposing the chapbook and then madly rushing to design, set, print, and compile the book in time for a reading I was giving a few weeks later. There was plenty of consultation and throwing around design ideas that happened between us, and I give major credit to Suzanne for her excitement in that process, as it, in turn, gave my interest in “Punks” a new life, too, after it had been sitting finished on my hard drive for a year and a half. I know Suzanne enlisted David Brazil, Judith Goldman, and possibly others in stapling and putting the books together, which extends the collaboration, as far as I’m concerned. I think you and I have felt the same excitement when we were putting out Bruised Dick, and Jenn and I have felt it too in working on olywa press.

If I had to reduce this to a thesis statement, I’d say that I believe this (a?) community is at its healthiest when there’s a steady stream of books/chapbooks/objects being produced by individuals and groups of people and then having those items trade hands on a steady basis. It’s an economy in the broadest sense, and while I believe in quality control and, by the same token, don’t want to idealize the mimeo era, I think we might be better off as a group of people if we took a page out of their handbook and stepped up the local collaborative production schedule a notch or two. I think that kind of steady publishing schedule is what’s made TRY! have such resonance for Bay Area folks. It’s kind of the house organ. So, you know, more stapling parties, maybe?

I’m interested in what you say here about the production of objects. What is it about the stapling party, for example, that appeals to you?  Is it that production is intimately tied to sociality, or does it have more to do with the end result, the physicality of a real object coming to exist in the world?

I think the production itself and the end result are both appealing to me, but I tie both of those things to sociality. As I’ve said above, I’ve experienced the small-press production of objects, the actual process, as a sort of temporary de-alienation process that can draw people in and at least briefly strengthen a social bond. But once that object enters into circulation, it has a social function, too. I’ve heard poetry communities referred to as gift economies, though often I think that is equated with barter economy; the analysis stops at the fact that we’re often not giving each other money in exchange for objects but rather exchanging objects themselves. But the fact that it’s rarely an actual “I’ll give you mine if you give me yours” situation tells me that a gift economy is really what we are — it’s not a trade of goods in a market but rather exchange as a total social experience that creates or solidifies a personal bond. This is bringing me back to a thought that I had when reading Lewis Hyde’s The Gift over the summer, so I’m going to risk being pretentious and quote myself from what I wrote in response:

I think that giving books away and its creation or solidification of a social bond is a phenomenon that’s there, but it seems like the level of social bond isn’t nearly as high as one might expect. And, well, books aren’t necessarily that common. Exchange of work, is, I think, the more common act of exchange, but I think the person who’s giving the gift isn’t actually who you’d expect. The nature of time constraints means that there’s a lot more work produced, even in one’s immediate community, than one has time to read. The gift, then, becomes the person asking for work and taking the time to read and respond, even in a cursory sense. That becomes a rarer and more “valuable” gift in such an economy.

I recognize that there’s a bit of contradiction in what I wrote over the summer and what I’m saying here, and it’s something I’m still sorting out, but I think the exchange of work — which is facilitated and expanded by publication as opposed to just handing out manuscripts to a few select people — that exchange, when viewed from a social perspective, is most important for the opportunities it creates for conversation, for possible creation of social bonds with the object as a facilitator. The gift of the book enables the giving of a larger gift, which is attention to the work inside that book. And so, following from that, if social cohesion is to remain strong in a community centered around a certain object (books of poems, mainly), it becomes important to have plenty of those objects created and entered into circulation.

At the end of “Punks” you list the various geographic sites of composition. Can you say some about how place influenced the work?

I’m glad to be asked this question, because I think of “Punks” as fundamentally a poem of place. Or, maybe more accurately, it’s a poem preoccupied with the idea of place, seeking it out but not finding it. The feeling of being dislocated was a constant as the piece was being written. I started writing the book in Portland, OR, about a year and a half out of college, in a period of time when I was feeling acutely unsure about where I wanted to live, which is a question that, for me, is tightly wrapped with questions of who I am and what I do. There was an initial burst of activity over two days, in which I wrote 40 poems, and then the work of editing/revision/compression continued over the next year. But, as you point out in your question, in year of writing and rewriting I lived in five places, and on top of it, those places also were pervaded with a feeling of transience, either because I was staying there in anticipation of moving elsewhere or because I was in living situations that never allowed me to feel settled.

Looking over the sequence now, I can see again how that feeling comes through in the content of the work. Not to lapse into too much close textual analysis of my own work here, but if I look at the first four lines in the first poem (“1980 rested on / your mistaken identity / as this layman Buddhist / of the failure movement”), I see my formal preoccupations at the time — to have fun with line breaks and entertain myself with general tonal disgust — but also can see the personal importance (to me) of the subject matter behind that language: 1980 is the year I was born, the “you” of the “mistaken identity” is most definitely me, and the “failure movement” is a turn of phrase that I found funny, but whatever that movement is, exactly, it isn’t exactly suffused with locatedness and positivity. All of that outside information isn’t important to anyone’s reading of the sequence, and not all of the language in the sequence has so personal a source, but throughout I think the language of frustration or disgust is coupled with language related to lack of connection to place and to the personal disruption (and just plain boredom, which is a real killer) that can cause.

One of the first things I feel when reading “Punks” is what I guess I might call polyvocality. I’m interested in how you think about “voice” and “sincerity” in your work? How do you think about “appropriation” and “tone”? Do you consciously (and consistently?) approach your writing from a certain theoretical perspective?

I think that in the writing of “Punks” I was consciously trying to infuse a sense of polyvocality via an experiment with pronouns — these unnamed you’s and he’s and she’s who say or do things throughout. It’s been pointed out to me that that, coupled with the fragmentation and density in syntax, lends to that sense of multiple voices and sources, and I’m willing to accept all of that. But even as I may have had that formal impulse to scuff the surface, to make the speaking voices multiple, underlying it is still the sense that I’m writing, literally, for my own voice, my own speaking voice, with the idea of me reading it out loud. I mean, there’s a link there to Olsonian projectivity, with the poem on the page as a script for reading, which is probably part of why I hate using periods in my writing, because I rarely experience myself in day-to-day life as having those kinds of hard stops in speech. It’s more like I’m trailing off with the constant possibility of continuing. I have, in fact, become aware of my tendency to end a large portion of what I say in conversation with “so…”  I’m not unique in that, but I have no idea how this happened. But maybe the line break is my poetic “so…” equivalent.

But on what feels a more bodily level, the focus on my speaking voice relates back to how I really started writing poetry (maybe “working with” poetry is more accurate), which was in a class with Bob Holman on poetry in performance. We read “Projective Verse” in that class, so the theory was present, but it was the experience of actually doing that kind of “projection” that sucked me in. Later, of course, I got heavy into NY School and Language writers and so on, with the disruption of the univocal “I” and all that. So I guess there’s always this tension in me between a disrupted or polyvocal surface on the page and in live readings and the fact that I feel like I’m writing for my own supposedly singular speaking voice.

To return to pronouns as an example, with “Punks” I liked experimenting on a formal level with how setting those pronouns into interaction with each other can have different effects, but what the pronouns are saying relates back to my personal experience so often that really they’re frequently interchangeable with “I.”  I mean, it’s not as though “get your face / outta the scuff bin, she says” is just a veiling of “get my face / outta the scuff bin, I says,” but I nonetheless experience those lines as personally resonant, as attached to a personal emotional state, even if it didn’t seem right to phrase them so that they’re coming out of my speaking mouth.

I guess that begins to answer your question about sincerity and, with it, appropriation. I once heard Anselm Berrigan give a talk where he said that his poetry may have a fragmented linguistic surface but that he felt like there was a direct, sincere kind of emotional continuity to it, too, which is pretty close to how I feel about my work in “Punks” and in general. I value sincerity in writing, which for me often equates with allowing messiness, emotional risk, and/or personal obsessions to seep somehow into one’s work. I used to call it a Poetics of Freaking Out. Sincerity equates with overflow, with what you can’t control. (That can happen, I think, with a range of techniques — sure, sometimes Flarf and conceptual writing, to use the in-vogue examples, lives up to its purported ironic detachment, theoretical distance, or “coolness,” but it just as easily taps into something beyond just a clever, sexy surface.)

That said, I think I have to earn my sincerity, both formally and emotionally. In the formal sense, I mean that I can’t just baldly express my emotions without a formal structure and think that my sincerity is going to get me a free pass in provoking the reader. In the emotional (if that’s the right word) sense, I think that too much “sincere” expression of any one emotion tends to diminish the force of that expression. Like, no one wants to be friends with that guy who is always trying to pull you in the corner and express how intense his feelings are. Regardless of the sincerity of intent, too much of that expression, in writing or in life, has the effect of feeling dishonest because the expression ends up rendered in a vacuum without  a countervailing force or two. It needs to be couched in a mix of approaches and registers — sarcasm, density, stupidity, humor, whatever. Like, some small talk please, dude. (It’s interesting how emotional concerns immediately slide back into formal ones; my attempt at differentiation of the two completely dissolves here.)

And all of that shapes my approach to appropriation, too. Often I’ll steal something because it feels like it has some kind of emotional resonance for me (and I’ve found, incidentally, that the emotion associated with what I appropriate is most often a variation on humor-inflected agitation), but it might also be to create the right mix of shifts in linguistic registers. I want to be responsible in appropriating something, which is why I generally try to avoid stealing something solely for ironic use (unless somebody is crying out to be fucked with), but regardless, I’m always trying, with success or not, to use that material to cut a sharp formal/emotional/conceptual balance.

Can you say more about this sense of responsible appropriation?  Is this a broader ethical question for you, or is it about writing a piece of work you regard as “successful”?

Attempting to be responsible in appropriation draws on the same concerns as attempting to be responsible in my writing in general, which isn’t really a question of fitting my writing into an abstract and predetermined ethical system but rather asking myself what (or whose) discourse I’m tapping into in the language I’m using and what effect that might have on a reader (particularly one who doesn’t know me). The choice to keep something as is or edit it into something else is often made in part with those questions in mind. Or rather, that’s part of what I think is going on underneath — it may sound, from the description of that process, like I’m self-censoring under the perceived eye of an abstract reader, but the experience in the moment feels much more like I’m making aesthetic choices rather than subjecting my work to ethical sanitizing. The ethical and the aesthetic are just so bound up in each other that it’s hard to unpack what’s what. And I’m okay with that, really.

I know that messy, unconscious things are going to work their way into my work, and I and others might end up uncomfortable with the result, but to try to become obsessively aware of it and then edit all of that out in the name of my stated ethics or politics — which is what sanitizing implies to me — seems impossible and undesirable even if it were. I may learn things I don’t like about myself later, may have others point those things out to me in their readings of my writing, but I think that kind of messiness is what makes something end up alive, interesting, and smart rather than inert and non-provocative. But what I can do in the process of writing is step back and make surface aesthetic choices of “yes, I think I can use this charged/offensive language here because I think the context makes it work in a way that complicates it” or decide that something just feels flagrant, excessive, or wrong. By context, I mean the language around a word or phrase, but I also mean my own subject position. Like, I’m willing to accept the idea that at some point a deep-seated patriarchal aspect of masculinity might come through in my work, and at times I may be exploring maleness in what I’m writing, but even in the context of that could I, as a cisgender male person, use the word “bitch” in a poem? I don’t think I could in a way that’d feel okay to me. If I were, I would really have to earn it, not just use it sensationally or in the name of an imprecise and lightweight satirical impulse.

All this said, those more surface linguistic choices aren’t always easy or clear, and I may not agree with my initial decision later. For example, in “Punkses,” an audio piece that riffs off of “Punks,” I use an audio sample of Alexyss K. Tylor, who hosts a public access show in Atlanta called Vagina Power. The show has an amazing intelligence to it mixed in with some stuff that is really bizarre. I noticed in the process of making “Punkses” that thematically there was a lot of material related to male sexuality, and so, whether unconsciously or not, the choice to use a sample of Tylor saying “a man’s life force is in his nuts” felt apropos as well as funny. But I’m left with the nagging question of whether it was right for me, a white male, to use this sample from Tylor, an African-American woman, whether my aesthetic choices in the piece were intelligent enough to impart the sense that while what Tylor says is funny, the piece is not trying to laugh at or make a mockery of this person. Is that what comes through to the audience?  Or am I just tapping into that long white American tradition, the discourse, of appropriating things done by African-Americans and using it in a mocking, careless, or simplistic way? I’m still not sure. The answer, ultimately, is probably not as simple as either of these, but I at least hope that it’s closer to the former than the latter. Regardless of this specific situation, though, this examination of the web of discourses I’m tapping into becomes the central ethical-aesthetic practice in my writing process. I just want to try to be aware of the active choices I’m making, even if what comes through unconsciously is inadvertently uglier.

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